BOB2024MIOT

En 2017 paraissait, dirigé par Monique Maillard-Luypaert, Alain Marchandisse et Bertrand Schnerb, et avec pour sous-bassement un colloque organisé à Lille et Tournai par ces mêmes historiens, un volume qui, sous le titre Évêques et cardinaux princiers et curiaux (XIVe-début XVIe siècle). Des acteurs du pouvoir, apportait un ensemble de contributions, notamment biographiques, sur cette figure paradigmique de l’homme d’Église appelé à exercer une action politique d’envergure, parce qu’il est issu d’un milieu familial qui l’y prédestine ou parce qu’il sert, à la cour, un prince, un roi, un pape. Sous une bannière commune – Église et État –, un second colloque, cette fois organisé à Versailles, s’est voulu à la fois le prolongement et l’aménagement conceptuel du premier à une époque plus récente, la période moderne, voire le début des temps contemporains. Le présent volume en renferme les actes. Ils s’insèrent dans cinq volets spécifiques : Rome, son clergé de cour, et celui des autres États ; le conseil politique ; les chapelles princières ; les confesseurs princiers et les clergés de cour dans le monde chrétien, catholique ou non.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, better known as the Apocalypse of John, or simply the Book of Revelation, has always fascinated its readers, both religious and non-religious. Its transmission and reception in a Christian context have given rise to a wide variety of interpretations and controversies. At the heart of this revelation are the enigmatic figures of a pregnant woman appearing in heaven and then fleeing into the desert, a prostitute appearing in the desert and riding a beast, and then the bride of the Lamb, as well as a great city called Babylon, Sodom, and Egypt. Cities, beast, and prostitute are usually interpreted as thinly veiled references to Rome and its empire, and in particular to the emperor Nero.

However, this reading raises a number of interpretative problems concerning the relationship between these different female figures and their relation to the beast, which duplicates into a beast from the sea and a beast from the land, and concerning the city that lies beneath Babylon. Although they do not all share the exact same point of view on the Apocalypse of John and on the solutions to these interpretative problems, the contributions gathered in this volume all question the received ideas in one way or another. What they have in common is a regard for the Apocalypse of John as a text strongly rooted in the Judaism of its time, and they place great emphasis on interpreting the text through attention to its author’s use of the Jewish Scriptures.

Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) can be considered as the most renowned operatic dramatist of eighteenth-century Europe. His drammi per musica travelled all around Europe – and beyond – throughout the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Courts, palaces, and public theatres were eager to perform his dramas, and so hundreds of composers set them to music, sometimes on more than one occasion.

This volume lets the surviving textual and musical traces speak for themselves. As a catalogue of the sources of five of Metastasio’s most successful titles – Didone abbandonata, Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Adriano in Siria, and Demofoonte –, it offers their most complete chronology up to date, as well as a detailed presentation of the printers and the theatres in which these texts became alive. In the case of the majority of these works, thousands of manuscripts and copies attest to more than one hundred complete musical versions and over two hundred and fifty productions. They may thus rightly be considered witnesses to the operatic fever that took Europe by storm in the Enlightenment.